Avoiding Spiders
 

Having trouble protecting from spiders your workshopped verse you'd like to submit to Poetry or other journals with illiberal policies toward online appearance? Here's a trick that might work.

1. Use a title for the workshop version different from the one you would use in submitting to a print journal.
2. Precede the workshop version with several lines of boilerplate: masking verse, doggerel, or whatever --in italics so critters in the know can ignore it but search engines will treat it as real text of the search result, and a search for your subsequent title or first lines will turn up nothing.

Here's what I plan to use as a mask when I next post a poem at TDE.


Il Ragno

Hence, loathsome robot spider,
Of Cyberus and blackest motive hatched;
on wireless web dispatched.
Probe not this poor provider
to my anorexic purse,
this embryonic, unbyronic verse.
A proper spider boldly moves on missies.
Creeps like you are misbegotten sissies;
So hence, begone, avaunt, and take this buffet,
back to your boss and bid him stuff it up his tuffet.


G/W

Thanks, Shaun. I didn't know the method you mention. It seems less disruptive than my suggestion. I'll try both and see what google searches turn up. In the recent past I've had four poems declined , with apologies, because of their prior appearance online.

G/W

I'm not sure that works, Shaun.

Clive

Some people report good luck with the tags, but it's also important that you not put the real title of the poem in the title field. If you do, the bots will find that.

If anyone else's post refers to the poem's real title without protecting it with tags, that too will mess things up.

I've been using it for awhile now and it seems to work. I just double-checked, since you mentioned it, and have found a number of websites that mention it as a foil to archiving robots. Specifically "...for sections of a site that shouldn't be indexed and shouldn't have links followed."

I think it was Stephen Collington who first mentioned it around these parts awhile back and I've been using it ever since.


Edited to add: that's a very good point regarding poem titles as subjects, though.

Yes, it was from Stephen that I first heard of it, too. Like you, I tried it out - oh, last autumn, I suppose. For a while, my thread was indeed masked, but after week or so, it was discovered.

Clive

I just googled "Avoiding Spiders" and the first hit was this thread, including your first response, Shaun, so the tag did not work at that level. I think I will risk one poem at TDE with the tag, a poem I probably wouldn't send to a journal like Poetry anyhow --unless you folks improve it greatly. I'll call it something or other and hope there aren't too many poems by that title out there. Here goes:

G/W

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

But! If you Google:

President robots bearing dishwasher cardinals

I bet this post won't show up. And I hope to god that no others do either...

It takes a little time for the bots to find the post. Check tomorrow, and the next day.

And as an example of how long things stay in the cache, consider this. My poem "Rose Catalogue in January" was pruned at whatever time I got the January pruning to work correctly, at least a couple of weeks ago. It still shows up on a Google search.